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Ask HN: What are your favorite tools for sharing/self-hosting images privately?

by cassidoo on 2/27/23, 7:01 PM with 2 comments

I've got a kid on the way, and I'd love an easy and private way to share photos with family. The absolute easiest way would be to use something like Google Photos, but I've heard just enough of the nightmare stories of people sharing a photo of their kids in the bath with their mom or something and getting locked out that I don't want to risk anything like that. My family isn't really tech-savvy, and many of them not on social media, so something like a private Instagram account wouldn't really work either.

I've seen things like Tresorit for private sharing, and also Pixelfed and Photoview. And honestly a good percentage of the devs I know just put a login page in front of a website with an S3 bucket of photos of their kids.

I'm probably over-engineering/overthinking this, but I'd love any and all recommendations y'all might have so I could research further!

  • by k310 on 2/27/23, 8:32 PM

    PogoPlug used to do this, but they folded. IIRC, they would give you a dynamic IP address so that you or others could access data on the device.

    Perhaps you could set up a photo server (software suggestions below) in house and arrange a tunnel (can't help you there) or run the server on a VPS and manage (http) access, presuming that's what the photo server software supports.

    This is a site that describes self-hosted photo albums: https://medevel.com/os-photo-collection-self-hosted/

  • by kasperset on 2/27/23, 7:23 PM

    I just use Flickr for keeping images that can be shared within close friends/family. Very old school but I love the annotation/note aspect of the Flickr. May be not very secure but good enough for my purposes.